Curve Finance founder proposes 17M CRV grant to fund 2026 development roadmap

Michael Egorov, who founded decentralized finance protocol Curve Finance, has proposed a 17.45 million CRV token grant that will fund several key initiatives designed to improve the protocol’s infrastructure and support a 25-person core development team.

“This proposal requests a grant for software research and development work, as well as related activities for the continued benefit of Curve,” Egorov said in the proposal posted on the Curve DAO governance on Dec. 14.

If approved, the grant will be awarded to Swiss Stake AG, the Zug-headquartered IT firm that initially developed Curve Finance and continues to maintain its underlying software infrastructure. The company operates independently of the DAO.

Starting January 2026, the proposal would extend funding for a new one-year period, mirroring the structure of a similar grant awarded in 2024 that concluded in August of this year.

Egorov acknowledged that while Swiss Stake AG has managed to establish several revenue streams, these earnings alone “do not yet make the company sustainable.”

“This grant will fund software research and development, infrastructure, security, and ecosystem support, ensuring that the 25-member team at Swiss Stake AG can continue its ongoing contributions to Curve,” Egorov added.

For 2026, Swiss Stake AG hopes to accelerate development across several high-priority initiatives that are expected to advance the protocol’s technical capabilities and product suite.

Some of the major areas of focus include Llamalend V2, which introduces admin fees for the DAO and expands collateral support, and FXSwap, Curve’s on-chain foreign exchange platform designed to support low-volatility assets like tokenized gold. The team also plans to continue development on crvUSD and its broader lending systems.

Simultaneously, the Swiss development team will continue maintaining Curve’s smart contract ecosystem and core software repositories. Any intellectual property developed using the grant will be released “under an open-source license compatible with the Curve software repositories.”

“Swiss Stake AG commits to produce bi-annual reports on the spending of the Grant Amount. It will list expenses in a summarized form and inform about the ongoing initiatives for which the funds are used. The report will be published in written form on the governance forum,” the proposal noted.

Upon approval, the firm will also be permitted to stake CRV tokens not immediately required for operational expenses in liquid locker platforms such as Convex and Yearn, with any yield generated used strictly in line with the terms of the grant.

Voting on the proposal is open through Dec. 22, 2025. At press time, all participating votes were in favor of approval.

CRV price action remains muted

CRV, the native token of Curve DAO, bounced from multi-week lows around $0.37 and was up more than 3% at the time of writing, although the uptick was not enough to offset the token’s seven-day losses.

That’s despite Curve Finance closing the third quarter of 2025 with strong revenue numbers. Protocol revenue more than doubled from the previous quarter, while DEX trading volume and stablecoin activity saw a notable surge across the network.